Lightroom alters colors - Can I stop this?

Question

Good morning. For the most part I have really enjoyed Lightroom an have used it to adjust many photos without a problem. However, while trying to match a very specific wall color (firebrick red), I noticed that the wall looks different (more vivid, to the red and slightly more saturated) in Lightroom than in any other program I own (none Adobe... sorry, I can't compare) including when applied as simple Windows wallpaper. It is only different in Lightroom.
I have imported and exported photos looking for clues such as preset loading or camera calibrations but found no alterations to these settings. This is with all photos, just less noticable when there is a mix of colors. If this helps, they are jpeg pictures.
Any ideas why it imports colors slightly different? Thanks in advance, Andy

Answer 1

Paul,
First of all: you're not crazy. Yes, there can be differences in color between color-managed and non-color-managed applications. Even when you're working with a sRGB image.
Second of all: there is no simple easy solution to this 'problem'. Until some de facto standard is set by which all monitors sold to end-users must conform to, there won't even *be* a simple easy solution.
So, now that I've stripped away all your hopes for an easy fix... let's continue. I'm going to try and paint a bit of a radical picture for you so that you might see precisely why this isn't an easy problem to address, and why turning off color-management doesn't guarantee you anything when it comes to how other web users will view your image.
You write: "I agree turning off colour management is madness BUT how else do you see how things will look on the web with a PC".
I must correct you on your own statement, for it should read (corrections in capital letters): "I agree... but how else do you see how things will look on the web with YOUR VERY OWN PC & MONITOR?"
In other words, turning off color-management will show you how the image looks on the web, with no color-management, on YOUR monitor... not the dude's monitor on the other side of the world viewing your image.
Let me further clarify by posing to you a rather extreme scenario:
Say your monitor is dying. It only displays reds with about half as much saturation as it should.
You have all color-management turned off (because, supposedly, you want to see how images would look to other web users who also do not have color-management turned on).
As you're editing your photos, you saturate the heck out of the reds... because your monitor is deficient in displaying them. You just haven't figured that out yet.
Now you upload these photos to the web. Your friends come back to you asking why everybody's faces in your images look as if they're blushing.
You go, 'huh'? Because those images look fine on your monitor, since your monitor is so inefficient at displaying reds...
Now, say, instead, you use color-management. You profile your monitor, and your hardware colorimeter/software intelligently figures out that your monitor can't display reds very well. In the 3-D plot of the generated monitor ICC profile, you see the gamut of your monitor not extend very well into the reds.
Color-managed applications, using this new monitor profile you created, thus enhance reds as they convert the RGB values in your images, on-the-fly, to corrected RGB values using your monitor profile. Suddenly, in color-managed applications, images don't look so dull in the reds anymore, and so you don't skew the saturation of reds in your images. You save the images in the sRGB profile, and then you load them up in Firefox/IE. Suddenly the images look dull in the reds... but now you know better and you exclaim to yourself: "aha! These images look dull in the reds as compared to in my color-managed applications, but that is because of my monitor's deficiency and the fact that Firefox/IE are performing no color-correction! However, my friend happens to have a fine, very sRGB-like, monitor, and when I view my image in Firefox/IE on his computer, it looks fine!"
Thus I hope that this extreme example shows you the utility of color-management.
The goal is not to get images to look the same between color-managed and non-color-managed applications but, rather, to allow you to see the colors of your image in some standardized fashion *in color-managed applications*. That is why we calibrate our monitors. You have no control over what the end-user on the web will see... his/her monitor might be completely wrong... or right. The best you can do is calibrate your monitor so that in color-managed applications you can edit the colors in your photo to how you desire them to be seen on *some arbitrary standard device*. Your monitor itself may or may not be this 'arbitrary standard device'... which is why the monitor profile is helping you to view the image as if it were on some 'standard device'. I guess it's kind of like a pair of eyeglasses -- bringing you toward some standard vision.
Paul, let me give you an anecdotal example:
The original monitor profile that came with my MacBook Pro basically over-saturated my images and super-saturated oranges (in color-managed applications, of course). Every time I viewed my image on the web (not in Safari, though), the image looked desaturated (mostly in the reds/oranges/yellows). I also asked: "Why don't web browsers resaturate images?" But then I learned this question was completely uninformed & nonsensical. Because when I looked at the image on a PC at my lab, it didn't look as desaturated, and also had a lot more yellow to it.
I finally got around to hardware profiling my monitor. The generated monitor profile, in color-managed applications, brought out shadow details, desaturated my images a bit, and re-introduced yellow into my images (and got rid of the orange cast). In fact, made them look much more like what the image looked like on web browsers on a bunch of PCs in my lab (all uncalibrated monitors) than what the image looked like on Firefox on my Mac (non-color-managed). By now you should be able to see that, in the end, it's much better for me to edit images in color-managed apps using my new monitor profile and in color-managed app with color-management turned off, right? Because, with color-management turned off, I will get a desaturated image (what appears in Firefox on my Mac) which I will try to oversaturate -- then this image will look oversaturated on the standard uncalibrated PC (general user view). I would probably also try to introduce some yellows, since, uncorrected, my monitor doesn't display yellows very well. So my images viewed on a more 'standardized sRGB-like' monitor would have appeared more saturated and more yellow! Where are all these inconsistencies stemming from? The simple fact that my LCD monitor on my laptop doesn't have your standard run-of-the-mill sRGB-like response (as many old CRTs DO). So getting the picture nice for non-color-managed applications on my own Mac doesn't guarantee me jack as far as how it'll look on my friend 'Average Joe's' monitor... in fact, in my example above, it would have rendered 'Average Joe' a oversaturated & yellowish image.
Whew, that was a mouthful, and I certainly hope it made sense!
-Rishi